by #
# At Mart van de Wege's suggestion, put in a personal note
# on getting into the "linux mindset"
#
# There is a note pretty far down in this version about
# virii, search for "Thomas"
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TABLE OF CONTENTS - PART 3
3.0 Part 3, Common Misconceptions About Linux
3.0.0.0 What is FUD? Why do People FUD Linux?
3.0.1.0 FUD Defined and Described
3.0.2.0 The Inevitable Discussion of Microsoft
3.1.0.0 Common Misconceptions About Linux
3.1.1.0 General or Vague Misconceptions
3.1.2.0 Technical Misconceptions
3.1.3.0 Misconceptions About the Community
3.1.4.0 Misconceptions about Linux's Future
3.1.5.0 Financial Misconceptions
3.2.0.0 Other Debunking Sites
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3.0.0.0 What is FUD? Why do People FUD Linux?
3.0.1.0 FUD Defined and Described
FUD stands for Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt. It refers to the
competitive practice of promoting your own product by planting fear,
uncertainty and doubt in the mind of the customer regarding your
competitor's product. There is a nice definition at
http://www.tuxedo.org/jargon/html/The-Jargon-Lexicon-framed.html
and a discussion here:
http://www.attrition.org/~jericho/works/security/fud.html
3.0.2.0 The Inevitable Discussion of Microsoft
Because Linux threatens Microsoft's revenues, one would expect
Microsoft to extol the virtues of their products and to downplay
any advantages that Linux has. They tend to do this by using words
like "cancerous" and "anti-capitalistic" in describing Linux and
the General Public License.
Since early 2002 Microsoft spokespersons have been heavily attacking
the GPL as a destroyer of jobs, decrying the alleged lack of support
that those who choose free software will suffer, and promoting their
own roles as innovators and protectors of standards.
Microsoft has also declared that the GPL directly harms intellectual
property and has, as of this writing, outlawed the use of GPL
software in at least one situation in the licensing terms of its
CIFS networking products:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/59/24885.html
The list of Microsoft arguments is long, but to read a penetrating
and devasting refutation of Microsoft FUD, try this link:
http://www.gnu.org.pe/resmseng.html
For definitions of the terms "free software" and to review the General
Public License, see these two links, respectively.
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/licenses.html#GPL
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
The term "open source" is often used interchangeably with "free
software", but this technically is not correct. To find out more about
"open source", see the site for the Open Source Initiative:
http://www.opensource.org/
3.1.0.0 Common Misconceptions About Linux
3.1.1.0 General or Vague Misconceptions
3.1.1.1 "Linux is hard to use"
Most people here on COLA answer this with their own experience,
which tends to run along these themes:
-> It sometimes seems harder at first because I was not used
to it, but it actually makes a lot more sense than, say, Windows,
when you get into it, and is well worth a little learning because
it is so powerful.
-> I read the manual and did what it said and it worked, what's
the problem?
-> I thought it was harder and I wasted a lot of time making it
harder than it was. It's not hard. Just get a good book, read
it, and do it.
-> Bullshit! (this is often the opinion of quarrelsome unix
veterans. But it's simple and succint, unlike
this parenthetical comment).
To get a little more serious, Linux as unix is based on a philosophy
of building up a complex system out of simple parts, each of which
does one job very well. This allows the user/admin/programmer to
learn a few simple principles and then extrapolate in any situation.
[Maintainer's Note: I had some difficulty myself getting into this
mindset, most often because I kept expecting Linux to be
/hard/, when it is not. It is /detailed/, but these details
build up according to consistent design ideas, which makes Linux
rather simple after all.]
A great deal of thought, decisions about what is a "proper" design,
goes into making sure that those extrapolations remain consistent.
It does not happen by accident and things which break or ignore that
precept need to be far better than what came before to continue
being used.
3.1.1.2 "Linux has no GUI"
There are two answers to this myth. If you are new to Linux,
then the simple answer is that this is false, because all modern
distributions that go by the name "Linux" contain not just one,
but several GUIs to choose from. If you are considering a first-
time plunge into Linux, don't worry, anything you buy or download
will have a GUI, and you can get deeper into the technical stuff
at your own speed.
From a purely technical standpoint, however, the statement is true,
because "Linux" proper refers only to the kernel, the innermost
part of a complete operating system, and that kernel does not support
a GUI.
In fact, there are several GUIs that are commonly used on Linux.
Many distributions include most or all of the popular ones
listed here.
The "mainstream" GUIS are often cited as being easiest for those
who are coming from other popular systems such as Windows:
KDE at http://www.kde.org
GNOME at http://www.gnome.org
The specialty GUIs, used most often because they require less
resources than KDE or Gnome, or because they better fit the personal
preferences of the user:
IceWM at http://www.icewm.org
blackbox at http://www.blackbox.alug.org
fluxbox at http://fluxbox.sourceforge.net
fvwm at http://www.fvwm.org
Window Maker at http://www.windowmaker.org
xfce at http://www.xfce.org
To keep things simple, the above paragraphs have used the word "GUI"
in an over-generalized way. The GUI itself is actually broken up
into the X Server, the Window Manager, and the Desktop (where even
the word "Desktop" is a little vague, a collection of programs and
libraries that create a certain look and feel). A complete
discussion of this system is far beyond the scope of this FAQ, but
generally when people talk about a Linux GUI they mean the X Windowing
system, plus a window manager and desktop (listed above). You can
find out more at http://www.xfree86.org.
It is also very common to run servers without a GUI to save those
megabytes of RAM for serving data over the wire. The ability to
eliminate the GUI altogether, an ability not shared by all
contenders for the server market, is often cited as an advantage for
Linux.
3.1.1.4 "Linux help is terrible"
First, it is the universal advice on COLA to anyone getting started
with Linux is to buy a good book. There is a strong liking of
anything by O'Reilly ( http://www.oreilly.com ), and the book
"Linux in a Nutshell" (currently in 3rd ed) is often mentioned.
Now, to be completely technical, when we speak of help for a
Linux system, we do not usually mean help for that single piece,
the kernel, that is Linux proper. We usually tend to assume people
are talking about help for the GNU command line tools, the X
windowing system, or other popular free/open software that is commonly
included with a Linux distribution. That being said...
The general feeling about the actual myth is that it is not true,
because Linux has a lot of different types of help, each of which
addresses a certain need. Trying to find what you need in the wrong
place can be very frustrating, so let's go through the types of help
that are available (we've already mentioned that a good book is an
enormous help).
Task-oriented documentation is found in what we call the HOWTOs and
Mini-HOWTOs. These are useful for specific tasks like setting up
a dual-boot machine. Find these at http://www.linuxdoc.org.
Purely reference material is found in the man system, while the info
system tends to more expository text, examples, and explanations.
We can make the following generalizations about them:
-> The actual help text is stored in two systems, called the
"man" pages and the "info" pages.
-> Man pages tend to be self-contained, treating one command
or idea to completion in a single concise document. They
are also intended to look good when printed. The "info"
system is a more comprehensive cross-linked library.
-> Both systems can access a topic from the command line with
simple commands like "man foo" or "info foo".
-> The text in these systems has been made available in a variety
of ways for those who do not use a command line often:
-> In KDE, you can enter #foo in Konqueror (the explorer-like
browser) and get the man page for "foo".
-> You can run the program "xman", which is a GUI front end
to the man system.
-> Some distributions provide their own integrated help
...
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